nav[aria-label="Primary Navigation"] { padding: 0; & ul { list-style: none; width: 100%; display: flex; flex-direction: row; justify-content: start; align-items: start; gap: 30px; padding: 0; & li { margin: 0; } & ul li { list-style: none; } } }

How do I access a compact view?

Tyler_ys8zu9

EDIT: I added a feature request for this if people want to comment on that instead, for higher visibility.

I have visual issues and have to use large text on a low resolution monitor. This results in a lot of wasted screen real estate, and makes it very hard to use the tools as they seem to be specifically geared for very large monitors.

How can I enable some kind of compact view that will reduce the amount of whitespace and condense controls, text, etc. into a denser format?

As an example, clicking on an issue in a search the issue viewport is only about 1/6 of the actual screen real estate, and I can only see a few lines of text or fields at a time due to the wasted white space.

If this isn't possible... why? Accessibility should be a major focus for any enterprise web app offering, especially from large well established companies?

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Andy Heinzer

Hi @Tyler,

I understand that you are using Jira Cloud in such a way that your monitor resolution is lower than typical, while the size of text is zoomed in via your browser for the sake of visibility and accessibility. I can understand why this setup might cause a number of usability problems. I am interested to learn more details about your environment.

What is the resolution of your display?

I ask because our Atlassian Cloud products do have a noted minimum resolution of 1024x768 in order to make sure that all the elements of the page will render as expected. Also that is with the assumption that the browser view is not zooming in. Given what you have stated, the monitor resolution might have to increase above that minimum such that the zoomed in text can still render the expected elements on the page.

Also, could you let us know what kind of device you use to access Jira? Is this a Desktop machine, or do you primarily use a mobile device (like a smartphone or tablet)?

I am curious to know more about your setup. Perhaps if I can learn more, I can then replicate the behavior here.

Thanks

Andy

Tyler_ys8zu9

Hi Andy, thanks for picking this up.

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The display resolution is 1920x1080.

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The browser is not zoomed in, but the text size is bumped to large in the systems settings.

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The device is a macbook, attached to a dock with a 25" (?) monitor. Browser is Chrome.

==============================

Here's a few screen shots from our upcoming migration to a new version. As you can see, the huge amount of whitespace makes it difficult to get a decent amount of working area if you're trying to do anything even remotely complex. (eg) I can only see 4 stories on the left, anything more complicated than a short description (eg a code snippet in a comment) will be scrolled both horizontally and vertically and the scrollbars don't line up with the viewport, etc. I could list a lot more examples of how the excessive whitespace makes the UI extremely high friction if you need them.

It will probably be worse when it goes to PROD as well, as our ops likes to put multiple, undissmissable, uncollapsible banners at the top of our JIRA.

I know lotsa whitespace is the kind of design paradigms these days, but there is a time and a place for compactness too... any design rule pushed to an edge condition generally fails, and this is definitely one of them. Which, presumably, is why so many web apps offer a condensed or compact view these days (along with Dark Mode, for which I am very thankful)

Screenshot 2025-02-14 at 1.08.06 PM.png Screenshot 2025-02-14 at 1.05.23 PM.png Screenshot 2025-02-14 at 12.59.06 PM.png

Tyler_ys8zu9

FFS... it deleted it when I copied and pasted my wrongly placed answer here. Ok, abridged version:

Thanks for picking this up, @Andy

Resolution: 1920x1080

Platform: macbook on dock with 25"(?) monitor

Browser: chrome, no zoom tho on some bad days eye strain does require me to do so

There isn't enough room due to whitespace reducing it by 50% or so to display a useful amount of information, such as cards.

Things like the editor have extremely high UX friction for reasons like

it's impossible to see things like code snippets easily,
scroll bars are not fixed to the viewport so horizontal scrolling is impossible for long lines except for the last 4 or 5 where the scrollbar is on screen,
section viewports do not expand with scrolling even tho the main page does, again vastly reducing potentially visual area thru even the most basic mechanism of scrolling the whole page
areas are not collapsible and minimum sizes for resizing are still large due to whitespace, making bringing a particular area into larger focus impossible
controls like select boxes are ludicrously over sized and extremely difficult to scan thru as only 3 or so items can be seen at a time (yes you can search... if every time you can remember or know in advance exactly what the text is for macro is you happen to want out of the couple dozen available)
there are things like undismissible, uncollapsible, unresizable, hugely white spaced banners across the top of our JIRA instance that further reduce visibility (our ops seems to be addicted to them, there are often two or three)

I have lots more if you like, that's just for the issues view.

Some supporting screenshots:

Screenshot 2025-02-14 at 12.59.06 PM.png
Screenshot 2025-02-14 at 1.10.29 PM.png Screenshot 2025-02-14 at 1.08.06 PM.png

Andy Heinzer

Hey @Tyler Thanks for the response and the screenshots. That resolution is more than sufficient. I noticed that you are using what we call the 'Issue Navigator' in Jira. This is what let's you search for issues within Jira.

There are two different modes to view issues in the issue navigator.

List View
Detail View

Your screenshot shows you're using the Detail View. While this can be helpful for looking at details of search results quickly, I personally don't prefer this view.

Instead I think you might benefit from switching to the List view for searching issues. You can do this by clicking the button immediately to the right of the Export option in the top right of that screen:

This will change what appears on that page immediately. Instead of Jira trying to show you the entire issue there, you will only see the preliminary search results on that page.

This alone might not solve all the problems I think you're experiencing here. But it's the first step I suggest trying. From there, when you click on the hyperlink of a Jira issue it will instead open just the issue (and not all the search results). I think this can help because it won't have that left panel with search results on that page, and will just show you that issue.

You should notice that the URL format will change when you view issues this way. The URL will looks something like [yoursite].atlassian.net/browse/ABC-321

But when you're in the Issue navigator (particularly the detail view) the URL of the page will typically have a format of

[yoursite].atlassian.net/issues/

[yoursite].atlassian.net/jira/software/c/projects/SCRUM/issues?jql=

I'd suggest trying that out first.

I think this might help with the other aspects such as code blocks. But try that view instead and see if this helps.

Andy

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